Firm grows by aiming
at the middle of market

By Michael Persson
Contributing Writer

Basing your business’ market share in dollars per square foot seems an odd metric, unless you sell carpeting. But for East Providence-based Peregrine Property Management, that per-square-foot statistic describes how far the business has come, and where it is today.

Firm grows by aiming
at the middle of market

Basing your business’ market share in dollars per square foot seems an odd metric, unless you sell carpeting. But for East Providence-based Peregrine Property Management, that per-square-foot statistic describes how far the business has come, and where it is today.

“We started in January of 2010, and at that time we were turning over $850 per month,” said co-owner Brendan C. Kane. “Three years later, that’s turned into $190,000 per month. Put another way, that’s 4 million square feet from 120 properties currently under management.”

Peregrine’s co-founders Kane and Jeffrey P. Spratt did not leave comfortable positions to take a haircut in salary and benefits simply for a change of scenery. “We didn’t want to create new jobs for ourselves,” recalls Kane. “We wanted a business.”

That business now manages properties throughout Rhode Island, Connecticut and southeast Massachusetts. Its staff has grown from its two founding partners to two dozen people. “The market was extremely fractionalized,” said Kane. “You had the big boys such as Cushman and Wakefield and your husband-and-wife team in a pick-up truck. We aggressively went after properties in the 30,000- to 50,000-square-foot range and grabbed everything in the middle.”

The partners’ goal was to bring into their portfolio the estimated 10 million square feet of potential business that exists in the region they serve. “When we started out,” Spratt said, “we said to ourselves that in five years we wanted to be among the top in our industry in the state. We’ve surpassed that. We are at the top.” •

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